Internet dating is pretty much made for the ladies, right? All you’ve got to do is throw up a couple of pictures, string together a few sentences that aren’t totally cliche, and wait for the emails to come rolling in. Sure, you’ll get plenty of messages from crazies, and old dudes, and people from other states, and people who don’t speak English, and people who just want to have sex with you, and people who just want you to have their babies, and people who just want to harvest your organs BUT once you delete those you’ll be left with some totally decent guys. Right?

I insisted that was right. And to a certain extent, I still do insist that is right. Internet dating, for being definitively modern, is still pretty old-fashioned. Men write women. It’s a one way street, plain and simple. Then the women decide whether they will write the men back, and the men sit and contemplate. Of course, ultimately, the jokes on them, because if she does decide to write back and they find each other irresistible, one day they might get married and then one day after that they might decide to have children so that one day after that she’ll have to pass an enormous being through a very small part of her body while he sits in the waiting room and drinks scotch and smoke cigars and very possibly wonders which of the nurses is hotter. So who’ll have egg on their face then, eh ladies? But for now, while it’s still just Internet dating, the women are definitely in the lead. I get one email a day, they get one email an hour. You decide who’s better off.

But I’ve asked women how they feel about this, and they beg to differ. Oh, how they beg to differ. Too many emails, they say, is far more burden than boon. It takes forever to go through them all, and if you have any hopes of finding the normal guy needles in the insanity haystack, you’ve really got to read each message. We should all have such problems. But still it’s an interesting point. And some insist, and these are very attractive women, mind you, that they don’t actually get as many messages as we lads might think. And these women are hot. I mean, I’ve dated them, so you know they must be prettttty foxy. Could it be that they’re too attractive, that men assume they’ll never write back, so they don’t even bother? Could these ladies possibly be right, that being an attractive single girl on a dating site is not all it’s cracked up to be? There was only one way to find out: put up a fake woman’s profile and see what happens. So that’s what I did.

A friend of mine had paid for his Match profile in advance, but had met a great girl and no longer needed it. Dying to find out what it was really like for the females, we jumped into action. We deleted his profile, images, everything – and replaced it with a woman we called SuzieQ. Her profile was smart – but not too smart. (Yeah, we know guys are dicks too.) We made her very approachable in terms of job, ambition, sense of humor – but also very desirable. And for her picture…well, we did what any self-respecting man in the computer age knows how to do: we typed “hot chick” into Google and clicked on “Images.” What we selected was something like this:

Hot, but in a wholesome, normal way, right? The fact that this actual woman is, I believe, a porn star is neither here nor there. So we put up her profile and you know what happened? The same thing that always happens. The women were right.

The responses SuzieQ received, in a word, sucked. The first day she probably got ten or fifteen emails, far less than I expected, and they were all deranged. There were several guys openly living in their mother’s basement, nearly all of them were weird looking, and none had respected poor Suzie’s age requirements. When women write 18-25 in their profile, do guys assume there’s a hidden x2 in there? There weren’t as many out-of-state emailers as I expected, but Staten Island was extremely well represented. Not since Jersey Shore has Staten Island been this well represented. But if there was one unifying principle in Suzie’s responses, it’s that were all pretty…boring. No one was funny or clever, no one was creative, no one seemed to really address her profile at all. It was just all vague, uninteresting blabber. And most of the messages were blatant copy and paste jobs. I felt so bad I wanted to write Suzie a note myself. Just so she doesn’t get down on herself, you know?

I too enjoy long walks on the beach!

The next few days were worse. The quality of the messages didn’t improve, and the numbers decreased rapidly. Pretty soon SuzieQ was getting one, maybe two emails a day. And to call them emails was generous. “Hey, you like underwear?” No sir, not in the way you’re asking, I don’t. After it was all said and done, my friend and I agreed there was only one or two guys that we would’ve responded to. That’s pretty, well, bleak.

Now, is that any worse than a man’s predicament? We don’t get many emails, and I assure you, almost all of them are awful. But what we don’t have is the pressure. It kinda hurts to read notes from 15 dudes who are hoping you’ll write them back. You feel bad hitting the delete button over and over on guys who’s league you are hopelessly out of, even if your league is an entirely fictional creation. Guys may have to do all the work, but it’s a guilt free endeavor. Either we succeed or we don’t, but we can forget about it and move on to the next battle. Women though, have to live with saying “no.”

I have a friend who was frustrated with his efforts on okcupid and asked the same question. So, with my permission, he created an account using me as the profile. At first the results were like yours, then real messages came through from decent guys, and finally — because “I” wasn’t checking the profile that often — they dwindled. It seemed a lot less fraught with unpleasantness than your experience, but perhaps that is because he used a different site or perhaps attractiveness makes a difference, as per the theory in http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/ .

Thanks for the article. I’m a successful guy, 33, attractive… And although I haven’t gone through the trouble of setting up a test account to see just what Match.com is like from a woman’s perspective, I have gathered as much in talking to women who I’d met from the site. I think your analysis is pretty spot on. Women seem to get so inundated with pitiful messages that the good guys’ messages sometimes get lost in the shuffle. In my experience, it’s even a little worse than that because I live 2 hours North of NYC. (It’s not exactly a bustling metropolis around here.) There are so few women on the site (in my area) whom I personally find attractive.

These days I just leave my profile active because.. well, why not? A great girl may spot me. But I stopped spending very much time scrubbing through search results looking for a gem. I’ll be in the produce aisle. ;)

I had a similar experience as a woman on Match.com until I started e-mailing guys I was interested in getting to know. After that, I had several great dates and met my current boyfriend of 2 years. I think all of the guys I messaged wrote back, and most of them were flattered that a woman took the initiative and wrote them. I definitely don’t think sitting around and hoping that one of the dozens of e-mails a woman gets will be worth responding to is the way to go.

Google referred me to this website as a result of a Match.com scammer I tried to investigate. As a woman, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to take the initiative and write to a guy. No sense wasting time and money hoping to hear from a guy who may not have seen your profile. Anyway, one guy replied immediately with a lengthy email, asking for my private email address. 20 minutes later, I went to check his profile and it was gone. The next day, there was a pic of a woman and a different name replacing that of the guy in my “emails sent” file. The profile itself never changed. I notified Match.com, but their reply was simply that they’d look into it and couldn’t tell me the outcome for “privacy” reasons. I guess the bottom line is that a buck is a buck and Match.com is here to collect as many bucks as they can whether they discover someone is using a fake profile or not. 3 weeks later, the female version of the profile is still up.

Did this really happen in the way you said? I mean, did the emails really decrease in number? I’m not that bad looking and I pretty much stay in my age bracket, specifically mention stuff in their profile and I get blown off right and left. Oh yeah, I own a house. I work out every day. I have set up fake profiles on facebook with attractive girls’ pictures and I know what kind of creepy emails girls get and my emails are NOTHING like that. Match.com has only made me have disdain for the women there specifically and women in general as fickle, bitchy, and just plain impossible to please.

What about the men, who seem to expect that even though they themselves are 5s, they can easily get an 8, 9, or 10? They’re all so busy slobbering over the women who look like models that perfectly attractive, girl-next-door types like me get almost completely ignored. I’m no fugly loser, either – I’ve lost over 80 pounds in the past year and a half. I’m a traditional girl too, so I’m not going to email men. Every guy I’ve tried to initiate contact with has either not shown as much interest as the ones who contact me first, or they just plain ignore me. Women do not have it any easier, even when they are fairly attractive.

“Every guy I’ve tried to initiate contact with has either not shown as much interest as the ones who contact me first,”

Then you should date the guys who contact you first. There’s your answer Jenn.

This is a classic trap of female comparison shopping, you want the male that is unavailable to your attentions and are terrified that the men who are propositioning you are actually on your attractiveness level. You probably have convinced yourself that the men who are available are simply desperate and thus sub-human filth. This is telling as it uncovers actual insecurities in the female. Namely that you lack competitive looks and thus lack respect amongst your female peers. Women searching for men based on the man’s looks is NOT a natural phenomenon, it is a twisted result of misplaced rights and modern commercialism. The men are perfectly fine catches if they have a job and keep their promises, REGARDLESS how they look. This means you should be open to dating, short, fat, old, black, bald, indian, chinese, nerdy, stale, scarred, video game playing, rapping, males if they like you, have a great job and keep their word whatever that may be. A man’s utility to the civilization is more important than their looks. Attempting to paint it otherwise is a gross indulgence and a mockery of the very civilization that these men built for you to feel comfortable in making these judgements. They reason you are being so picky is because someone is paying for you, be it your family or a mindless employer looking to fill their executive ranks with pretty girls. Judging how a woman looks is the man’s domain because men MAKE MONEY TO BUY BEAUTY, not the other way around. Likewise women look beautiful to be purchased, not to rope in some dude who happens to look like some flimsy cultural ideal, these rakes are often like women, living off of the goodwill the greater men provide but do nothing but indulge. Get out of this role reversal and you’ll be happier.

This fear that you lack a premium is nonsensical and brought about by the incessant comparison contests championed by a television borne generation. Subconsciously you know you have it easier than most men, most guys get a pitiful amount of replies. You just want the creme de la creme of males on the site and are using psychological filters to justify this fact.

Online dating sites simply cater to female narcissistic tendencies too effectively, and in the end its lures create a massive time sink for both genders. As we see from Jenn’s example it feeds into her choice addiction and passively romanticizes the online dating experience to the point where what is considered a premium male narrows considerably within the white noise of messages. Also affected is a female’s fairy tale checklist or script, i.e. her guarantee that she is getting a quality male where it becomes so preposterous that she actually creates a dilemma where no male fulfills these concocted storybook roles.

Thus online dating has become a frozen tundra of the female ego. Most women are unwilling to accept the blizzard of males on the site who leave them cold and clutter their hunting grounds. The men are nearly uniform in their worthlessness except for the few isolated fires that burn in the night to which all women huddle around, but lack enough space for all of them. The few and far between “hot” guys as they are known. But as soon as one is found the stampede of women all but stamp the fire out. This is an icy world indeed.

Now hang on a second. Maybe you can deal with rejection after rejection but some guys have things called feelings. I am not trying to put you down but come on, if the girls faced even 1/4 the amount of rejection we had to face, they would be complaining constantly and having even worse self-esteem issues, and that is what I call a double standard. Don’t reinforce men simply accepting being rejected by what I have come to perceive as stuck up, spoiled poorly parented American girls just because you don’t feel like men face pressure. I’d kill to have hundreds of emails from unsuitable women if not to just feel like I’m still attractive. By law of numbers if these women aren’t finding at least a few of the emails they get to be worth their time, then they need a reality check because looks aren’t everything.

And by the way, I don’t remember the last time I saw a man’s profile say something like ” Don’t just say something generic to me like hey or hows it going? Impress me by being creative”. That should be a red flag that something is seriously wrong with today’s women right there. I’m too mad to keep going on about my point at this point…. UGH!!!

I have tried Internet Dating off and on for years and have rarely ever had any Female E-mail me or respond to an E-mail I sent them. I am attractive, smart, fairly well-off and am a writer capable of composing honest thoughts and engaging E-mails. I don’t know about you but having “Too many” responses seems like a High-Class problem to me, especially compared to no responses.

I definitely agree with the guy above me. At least ladies have the option to pick and choose, we have to settle for whoever responds…which 99.9% of the time isn’t really the girl we were most interested in. Don’t get that confused with “the hottest girl” either. I have messaged girls that based off profile info I had tons in common with, and spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about what to say in a short but personalized message. What do I see? This: READ – DELETED in my sent box. It makes me wonder, just who the hell are these girls waiting for?

Now if you are hot, fit, college educated, have a solid career, an awesome cook, and can even throw down on some video games (i.e. the perfect woman) then go ahead and ignore every single guy around until Prince Charming himself comes…however, for the rest of you: get real.

I am a 26 year old, tall, fit, intelligent (I work with prototype Navy equipment), and financially secure man that has no problem getting smiles on the street and striking up conversation at the pet store, or with one of the cute foreign girls at my pool…but in the realm of online dating websites is another story. It amazes me how pumped up even Plain Jane’s ego can get on these dating sites.

You may be asking now, “so why are you complaining if you can do good in person”. Well, because it is very very fine line in being smooth and creepy in getting things to the next level in person so most of the time I’m too afraid to go for it. So, back to what happened online. In the course of things I tried just about every message and profile technique in the book. My sent message to respond ration was on average 10 to 1. From there 1 in 3 responded a second time, and maybe 1 in 2 actually didn’t flake out on going on a date.

The dates: a serial dater, classic fat girl hiding behind very very clever pictures, an “oh by the way I’m still married” girl, a chain smoker who “doesn’t smoke” in her profile, and the girl who talked about her ex the whole date. Now, they weren’t all bad. There was two dates where I just had nothing in common with the girls, and I did get laid once out of the whole deal. However, the entire reason behind giving it a try was to get a girlfriend. The end result: damn near 300 sent messages, lots and lots of vanished into thin air text conversations (why the hell do people not want to talk on the phone these days?), a handful of bad first dates, and some awkward the next morning drunk sex…not exactly a winning situation.

So, that being said for me Match and OKCupid were a huge waste of time. I guess I’ll just have to figure out that fine line between smooth and creepy and start asking girls out in person.

My response rate is somewhere between 1:10 and 1:20 depending on the week. One thing that I have noticed is that I do get quite a wink about every 2-3 days or so. Half of the time, I’m actually interested in getting to know the girl that winked at me. However, I respond with a few short questions such as: “Hey! I’d like to get to know you better! I see you like playing golf. What’s your favorite golf course? How did you like living in Colorado?”…something not that difficult to answer, but relevant to what she wrote in her profile…and I get no response. Why would a woman wink if she’s not actually interested in getting to know me? I conclude that she either did not read my profile and only went off of a few stats or she’s just looking for an ego boost. Either way, it wastes my time. One thing that match.com does wrong that EH does right is that it should not require such an investment of time to express interest. Women complain about getting winked and guys not taking the time to write a few sentences. But it’s really a numbers game and a lot more women would get contacted if it was easier and more acceptable to just sent them 5 multiple choice questions…at least for the first round of communication.

I call B.S. on this article. I sent out probably a hundred emails, none of them weird, and I look like a normal, wholesome guy, with a good education and career. I have pictures posted, am in shape, and have a well written profile, without looking too picky. How many dates have a I gotten? None.

Here is “their” idea of a weird guy on Match.com.

If you don’t make over $150K, delete.

If you don’t live within 10 miles, delete.

If you don’t live in a swanky area, delete.

If you aren’t 6′ plus, delete.

If you don’t drink, delete.

If you haven’t traveled all over the world, delete (obviously gold digging for free expensive vacations).

One woman even wrote in another blog, if you don’t write a “funny” email, delete (in other words, we have to be a comedian, too, with a stranger).

Listen to the woman complain in this article about how much work it is do delete all those emails…poor baby!

Online dating is a sham for men. Men should boycott it so women actually have to work to find men again.

I am a woman and I write emails all the time, but the response rate to those emails is less than 1%. Guys read the email, look at my profile and then, nothing. I have had people look over my profile and there are no red flags. My emails are a 3-5 sentences about what we have in common, very similar to what Jake above writes. I’m attractive, so it’s not that I am ugly or fat. I just get nothing and it makes me feel worthless. Well, that’s not true out of the 36 emails I have sent in the last 2 weeks, I got one response from a guy who winked at me first. We don’t have a lot in common and he is 3 years older than my age range but I wrote to him anyway because I am lonely and want to date someone. I wouldn’t reject any guy in my age range who I share interests with, even a wink or a how are you? message, but they never write me.

I don’t believe you 1% of what you said. Trust me. I’ve been on dating sites for the last 10 years. Never ever did I get email from a woman. It just doesn’t happen. They became too comfortable, almost mean, egoistic. Essentially, they forgot what they are about. So, please, send your lies to somewhere else. Not here.

Yeah, part of me really thinks I may have wasted my money as well. I agree with Michael above, I am not the most attractive guy and definitely not rolling in the dough, but I am a nice guy and actually took time to put thought into my profile. So far all it’s been is you got a wink, you got favorited, such and such looked at your profile but nobody has taken the time to email. I get a wee bit annoyed when I send out emails, I can see they were read but don’t even get one back that says “hey thanks for messaging me, but I don’t think you are what I am looking for.” From what I have seen so far the women don’t take initiative to message you period. It is even better when someone favorites you and you send them an IM asking about stuff they are interested in on their profile and the response is “such and such just left the chat.” Sorry this came off as a bit of a rant, but just frustrated at what to date seems like as a guy a one sided road.

So I’m supposed to feel sorry for the poor women? Yeah… I don’t think so. I’ve tried a few sites. Same results on each… Zip. I’m a good looking guy… No debt. No drugs. Don’t smoke. Exercise. I’m an artist and musician, and I have my own biz. No ex, no kids. Never cheated on a girl, always respectful… yet not a sucker. I have lots of interests. When I emailed women, I touched on things in their profile. I did’t shoot outside my league. I’m never rude or just say ‘hi’. I got nothing. No replies. I’ve sent messages to women who had so many things in common, including some who even grew up in the same town as me. Nada. It’s a joke. And the guy who said you have to be over 6’? You can cross that off the list, because it doesn’t help either… I’m well over 6′.

Women are obviously not cut out to be in this position of power. It’s just not natural. Any guy who has watched a woman shop for shoes all day and come home with nothing, knows they are not exactly great at making choices. They go on these sites and mercilessly go through countless guys, finding some lame excuse as to why every last one of them isn’t good enough. It’s sadistic. And they aren’t getting ‘confused’ and deleting the wrong people. Countless times I saw that the women looked at my profile, then still didn’t reply.

I was walking down the street the other day, and a gorgeous young girl half my age stopped to talk with me. SHE stopped. I was actually embarrassed because I knew how much older I was. In the real world I can get that, but on a dating site, I’m the elephant man that supposedly isn’t worth even talking to for 5 seconds.

Giant waste of time… Guys, get out there, go to the park, go to church, whatever… Anything is better than online dating. Let all those women just sit on there and rot. There’s tons of loser guys on there that the poor women have to put up with? Yeah, gee… I wonder why. What decent guy in his right mind would just sit on a site for months, never getting a single reply, ever? There’s no decent guys, because the women drove them all away. You reap what you sow.

I agree with most of the guys here. I have tried Match.com and it’s a bit of a joke for us. I do not aim outside of my age range, my looks, or my wealth bracket and yet I rarely get replies. I did have three dates with this lady I met on there, and it was okay but we didn’t really click. However that is rare, since most women won’t even reply to an email, and those that do usually don’t take it far or even seem interested in their replies…

I’ll grant you, I’m not wealthy and I’m still in school in my late twenties, but that isn’t the problem right? I thought women were supposed to like honest, decent looking men who are educated/getting educated? Ah well, poor me.

The thing is, online dating just sucks. My only meaningful relationship so far has been with a woman I met at school. Maybe men should boycott online dating?

I read this article with interest. I had actually put “who has it better on Match, men or women” in the search engine to see. I am a woman and have been on match off and on for the past two years. I can see the point of view of many of the guys but it is also hard to be a woman on match. My situation is a bit unique as I am a single mom of six children, all adopted, all under the age of 16. I read men’s profiles and, for the most part, they are always looking for women 10 -20 years younger then they are. I would not have a problem writing to a man versus waiting to be written to but I do, as several of the men have mentioned, try to respect their parameters. I am 49. So, if they are my age, and I click on their parameters during the daily match “matches” it is frustrating to see their age range often listed as 30 – 45 and say that they don’t want children. Maybe I am approaching it all wrong but even though I am NOT looking to get married or looking to be supported, I would want to know the person I am dating is open to children and respects the fact that I have children. So, when they are looking for women much younger or say they don’t want children, I don’t write. I have written men on match when I come across a profile I think is very unique or funny and let them know that, even if we are not a match, they have a great profile. : ) I am in school, work out and lift weights, am financially secure and am reasonably attractive. Meeting men in real life is hard as well. So, back on match, hoping for a better experience but truly wondering about the validity of it all. Oh, and last time I had my profile hacked and the hacker turned me into a man for the 48 hours I didn’t realize I had been hacked and emailed just about every woman on the site. That was not fun to clean up either. But, here I am, trying it again. Sigh……

This is a very interesting perspective. I definitely relate to it. I’m a 39 female. My age range is 35-45 but most of the messages I receive are in the 48-58 range. Ive been lucky enough to receive emails from people mostly in my region but I live in a very big city. The emails say things like, “nice smile” or “hi there.” Although I appreciate the effort, if I was interested, how am I supposed to reply to that? It would be nice if they asked a couple of questions to get the ball rolling. In fact, one guy simply asked if I like my toilet paper roll over the top or underneath & I appreciated the effort so I Immediately replied.

Being a modern lady, I thought I would try to send emails to men whose profiles were appealing. I made a point to keep it brief while mentioning mutual interests and asking a couple of questions that might start a dialogue. Much to my disappointment, most responses completely ignore my questions, make comments about my appearance and/or or immediately ask to meet. Hello? I’m sure most of the men are completely normal but that doesn’t mean I want to meet in person before you tell me your name. That seems creepy. And since I sent the email, I’m interested & did all of the heavy lifting. I’d really like to meet someone that I click with, but I have to say that match.com is very discouraging. I appreciate your articles. They’re very insightful & entertaining which is about the best thing I am getting out of my online dating experience right now.

To address some of the comments the male readers have said above, I think the male / female experiences are very similar. People create profiles with a specific criteria for a reason. Although I may send emails to those that aren’t 100% match, I’m not offended if they don’t respond nor do I expect one. A polite rejection is just one more thing I have to read to get to an email that may be a good match & I’m on the site to meet people after all. I also think everyone’s preference is different and as long as you make an effort to be yourself and start a dialogue, you shouldn’t worry about silly tips or gimmicky emails. If someone requires you to be something you aren’t they’re probably not a good match.

Thats not true really. Im a attractive guy and i have to live with saying no too. It goes both ways. Also i have taken the time to write very nice emails and have found it to be a waste. If I’m interested in the girl i escalate quickly to a date. This weeds out any attention whoring behavior on her part and saves me time and energy. I have found that a lot of women are on those sites for an ego boost and to feel desirable. Always make sure the juice is worth the squeeze and don’t chase. They already think negatively about you if you’re on a dating site. Its like trying to prove them otherwise and most the time its not worth it.

After reading this and other reviews about match.com and being a member on and off for many years, I concur with the comments here, and I have come to the conclusion that the majority of the women’s profiles are not real and have been put there by the company itself, that’s why women don’t reply to the over 300 sent messages from the Brat Pitts around. The <5% of replied messages are from the real profiles. So no need to feel like the elephant man, just if you try online dating, know the odds of success.

I found this article because I am baffled by my results on match.com and I was looking for some personal experiences from others.
I am an attractive female 29, blonde hair, blue eyes, slender/toned, successful, kind and genuine. I get a lot of attention from men both on the site and in everyday life. I do NOT go for very attractive men because from experience I have learned that their egos are out of control. I go for average looking NICE guys with no emotional issues. I have been on dates with guys who (apearence wise), I was out of their league because I truly want a great relationship. I have had some bad relationships in the past and I now know what I am looking for, I know the red flags. I joined match because I moved to a new state and I don’t know anyone at all. I’m lonesome. I have gotten 72 emails in one week, those who have emailed me are wayyyy out of my criteria, one guy talked about all of the pain he has had in his life from deaths in his family on his profile, most of them are men in their late 40’s and others didn’t even take the time to give their profile any thought (misspelled words, horrible grammar, picture taken in the shadows so you can’t see anything), others look like they would kill a bear with their bare hands, another was cometely full of himself- spoke about his family business and money, etc, etc. No one normal. They are either older or scary in one way or another. I’m just looking for normal…Since that is what I have to choose from, I decided to do my own searching and emailing. I have sent emails to 3 different men, very short and sweet emails. And I have not gotten any responses….they view my profile, and never respond. Can someone please explain this to me? To be 100% honest, I am an attractive female. I know I am a rare find. I just do not understand what is happening on match.com. I know I haven’t sent out a ton of emails but it sounds like women don’t email men very often on this site. For a moment I thought maybe it freaked men out to have a female initiate? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. In my daily life I can get whatever man I want- I just haven’t come across any or they are married, and quite frankly I’m afraid of dating another psycho so I figured match.com would be a good way to get a feel for the guy’s personality first. If anyone can give me an answer as to why an attractive, nice female is being ignored after emailing on match.com, I welcome some feedback. Thank you.

I’ve been on Match.com for about two months. I don’t wait for anyone to contact me because most who do are in Alaska or are 35 (I am 67). My experience has been that there are very few men in my age range who are interested in women in their age range. I had interactions with three perverts I had to block, 2 guys I met once who were nice enough, but not a good match, which is fine.

I got one email from someone who said I was pretty active – hmm.. yes. So I looked at his profile and he described himself as boring and a couch potato (?).

I keep searching because it’s a big site. OKCupid is limited and so is JDate. The most pervasive thing is ageism in everything. If you look at my profile you’d see that age is irrelevant.

I also don’t understand, in this day of digital photography, the numerous fuzzy shots, one-photo selections.

Yeah whoa whoa whoa STOP IT GUYS. A LOT of these comments run along the lines of, “women on these sites are egoistic,” “it’s a 1st world problem to be messaged all the time,” “you basically get your pick of who you want” and let me assure, you, as a woman, it is NOT THAT.

Some background: I am a fairly experienced paid model. I also have a job full time at a law firm and graduated with a 3.6 GPA from UCSB. I am 24 years old, 5’7″, 123 lbs, and part Asian (the rest is white). My last boyfriend was also a model. I am on Match.com and OKCupid.

I understand that it can feel bad being rejected. Trust me. The number of times I’ve messaged a guy on OKCupid or Match.com and gotten NO response (and I HAVE messaged a few guys, AND seen the “read” status with no response)– it sucks! I commiserate with the fact that there is a dumb societal pressure for men to have to do most of the messaging, and here is where I really think the communication breakdown lies:

1. Men have to do all the talking– and most men have no idea where to start.
Let’s face it– the way men are brought up in our country is not exactly to befriend women and get to know them better as a person. I hang out with a lot of dudes on the regular and I’m surprised sometimes how infrequently they have close female friends. I also know a lot of females who don’t have close guy friends. If we don’t get to know each other as people, we end up sending messages like “sup, babe,” or “you’re hot” or some lengthy, obviously copy-and-pasted message that makes me feel like I’m just one of a thousand. I know what you’re thinking– you have to send a thousand messages to get a response and you can’t personalize every single one, right? This brings me to my next point:

2. Women are so used to being harassed by men that we are freaked the fuck out by you guys.
Listen, I know it seems like a dream to have a thousand women send you messages like “you’re hot.” Here’s the thing– it isn’t like that for women. Our wet dream is not to have a bazillion naked dudes around us, that just sounds like an awkward orgy we accidentally thought was a housewarming party. Also, consider this: the NUMBER ONE cause of death in the United States for women… is men. I’m not saying you’re all murderers or bad guys! But on average, you are bigger, scarier, and to be quite frank, the amount of times I consider bringing my can of pepper spray out on a date is quite high. You are BIGGER (on average) than we are: you could physically rape us and we could do nothing about it. This is why women hate being catcalled on the street. When you’re the one in power, women catcalling you feels like a compliment because they can’t hurt you. The other way around, it feels scary and rapey and threatening, and also feels like you don’t give a shit about our brains and you only care about how we look. We know you mean well (most of the time). But them’s the facts. For a better explanation, see this Louis CK skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDh4qk1Tl8k

Also, beCAUSE we get so many harass-y messages, even though 50% of them may be well intended, we disregard all of them because it is OVERWHELMING to try to go through each profile. And most of us feel really bad. I stopped using OKCupid because there were guys on there who would send me a message and seem really nice and cool and it seemed like we had a bunch in common, but I’m not gonna date you, man– we’re just not in the same league. But I want to be friends? So if I send a message back, I’m stuck– you’re going to think I’m interested. And if I tell you later I just want to be friends, then I’m leading you on, and it’s all my fault. So really, it’s safest for us to just not reply at all.

Also, guys do NOT know how to take pictures of themselves. I know a lot of good looking dudes whose Tinder profiles are just WRECKED. Like, cmon, A. Don’t post a pic of you next a hotter friend. B. don’t post a profile pic where I can’t see your face. C. Think about it as if you were a lady looking for a hot dude: one nice smiling pic where you have no double chins, no pictures of your ass, more than 2 photos. Thnx.

3. This leads men to feel rejected and angry.
It’s a completely human and justified feeling to feel angry and frustrated when you’re trying to find a connection with someone and you put yourself out there and try to be vulnerable and it feels as though people are disregarding you. I completely understand that, it sucks! I was super weird and definitely not attractive in high-school and honestly, I’m glad for it, because the number of times I got rejected helped me be much more stable today. And it leads to things like the posts above where, because you don’t hear from women, you naturally assume how they’re acting. “Oh, she must think she’s better than me,” or, “Oh, women have a much easier time,” and I get it. It’s like when a friend is always late and you don’t hear from them and you start to think, “wow, they must just not care about me at all” when really they have ADHD and are accidentally cleaning their apartment and then they slap themselves because they completely forgot and they feel really bad (I have ADHD, this happens ALL the time). So try to see both sides of the equation.

My only conclusion here is this. A lot of these problems are caused by the way we are supposed to view each other as genders. The guy-chasing-girl thing comes from a dumb, antiquated past (and the shitty flip-side of this is that often girls who make the first move are perceived as slutty or coming on too strong or easy and are thus also disregarded) that expects women to be virginal (HAH!) and men to be the fucking Marlboro man and doesn’t exist anymore. Men are taught to be providers and to find a woman to provide for and not being able to find that is scary. Women are supposed to sit there and wait for a dude to come to us but we get disillusioned when it seems like everyone just sees us as pieces of ass and so there is definitely sometimes some vindication that comes from pressing the delete button on a message. The one thing that I caution against is that the misunderstanding of each others’ experiences leads to things like the shootings at UCSB, where Eliot Rodgers got fed up with womankind because of his misconceptions of what women and men should be to each other, and he shot a bunch of people, including one of my good friends (he’s fine now :). The PUA and APUA (anti-pick-up-artist) movements have started because women are becoming more independent and less dependent on finding a man, and this leaves a lot of men without a toolkit for dating, because what we’ve been taught from movies and TV shows and our parents’ generation is in no way applicable to Millenial dating.

So here’s my suggestion: get off OKCupid. Get off match.com. There’s no way to win dating sites. And try your darndest not to focus on the idea of “dating;” instead do two things:
1. Figure out a way to love yourself. And be okay with the idea that you’re by yourself, alone, single. You’re not going to randomly drop dead if you’re single, and you’re not going to die in a corner in 80 years alone– that doesn’t fucking happen. Don’t try to find a match. Do stuff you like. Try to be a good person. Get to the point where you respect the person that you are.
2. Make friends with a member of the opposite sex. FRIENDS. DO NOT CHASE. Don’t think of sex, don’t do it. I don’t care if you have to jack it twice a day (ladies and dudes), but make a friend of the opposite gender to the point where you respect their brain and their point of view as a woman or as a man. You can’t date a person of a gender you don’t respect; it leads to arguments and shitty things. So learn to respect them.

It’s a hard battle, but it’s worth it. This prevalent anxiety where women need to find a man to be validated and men need to find a woman to be successful is total crap. We aren’t supposed to be completing each other. We’re supposed to be a team. At the end of the day, I just want a best friend who loves me, who respects me, who supports me, who argues with me, who drinks beers with me, and who has bangin sex with me. And I highly suspect I’m not going to find them on Match.com.

First off, thanks for taking time to write to articulate your point (and thanks for the Luis CK video- I wouldn’t want to date a bear-lion either :)). I do have similar issues as the men above when it comes to online dating (the striking out portion), but I do feel like their responses are from a place of heavy frustration and lack of willingness to learn about the opposite sex. Men and women are different, this is very clear, but the rejection they feel is clouding their judgement and allowing them to generalize the opposite sex as a whole.

Generalizations are easy, it allows you to put things into a neat box without putting much thought or understanding about the matter at hand. Neither gender has it better, they are just are different. It seems to be the natural way of things for humans to want to compare things and decide there is always a winner. Life is not like that. Some things in life are just what they are; hidden in their own unique shade of grey.

To D_D,

It seems unfair and unhealthy to say that it obvious that women are not good at making choices just because their choice was not you. If you had 100 emails to cipher through in one week (and I will assume that if you are saying women are not good at making choices that you feel men are better at making them), I bet it would take you a while to get through all of them, and I bet you would be too exhausted to respond to every little one. Since you have watched a woman shop for shoes in the past, if in that experience you felt frustrated and hoped she would choose already- consider that’s exactly what these women are doing on these sites…making choices.

It is simple to say these women are just narcissists and they just enjoy the attention; if that is the case for some women consider why they might feel that way. Even in your description of the girl that stopped you on the street to interact with you, the only way you described her was that she was gorgeous and young. Nothing about her personality, if she is smart, funny, quirky – nothing- just that this cool girl that stopped you only had physical attributes that made you interested. So how must women feel out in the dating world when some men have this objective view of women? Probably like they should be physically attractive if they are going to be successful right? They might feel like if they didn’t prop themselves up like dolls, men would not be interested. So some seek validation- so what. If you got 100 emails where people said,”Ur hot ;)” you probably would feel like you had something to offer. Your one story of your gorgeous young girl giving you attention was validation enough for you to rate yourself above a 6.

The online dating system is flawed. I am on this thread because I wanted to research what people were actually experiencing to better my chances to find someone that I connect with. It is actually refreshing to hear stories from people about their dating woes because it makes me feel like I am not alone in my experience.

For men: I feel your pain when you put yourself out there to someone and you hear nothing back from them. It takes time to write a good email, so it is always discouraging when you get no response. Just know that if you are putting yourself out there by putting care into your emails and profiles, you will eventually find what you are looking for.

For women: I cannot fully understand what you are going through but it sounds exhausting. I am constantly perplexed by guys that can’t seem to have a normal conversation with women. There are more women statistically in the world then men, so this would mean that there are many men with sisters, girl cousins and mothers, so why didn’t you learn anything? I wouldn’t want some dude emailing my sisters like, “hey wassup, ur hot.” There are still great guys out there, try your hardest to read between the lines.

This is WOW ridiculous. If any women (real women) are reading this. Forgive the men on here. Most are frustrated and don’t really know how to express their frustration. Now I will say I also agree with some of what they said. Here are my results. I probably range around a solid 7. Make 100k a year. Got my own place, own car, etc. etc. I do the typical guy thing. I expect very little from a woman other than the typical, honesty, compassionate, kind, caring, etc. I’m divorced with two kids who I share custody of (so defiantly not a dead beat dad). So as I said I’m probably solid 7. I don’t message ANYONE that is less than 30 or over 35, has never been married or message only profiles that say they don’t mind divorced men. So I stay in my lane so to speak.

I’ve messaged good number of women. Of which, 10 or so responded back. Few flaked out completely and I went on dates with few. The ones I went on a date with complete don’t match their profile pic or personality. Or only came out for the free drinks or dinner. Yup I’m old fashion, I’ll pay for the first date. But most of the time, the dates were horrible because they either don’t talk at all or they talk only about themselves. This comes from profiles stating they are tired of dating or they are looking for someone they want to connect with or any of the normal profile [junk] these days for many women. It’s fine you want to spice up your profile, but please don’t say you are one thing and act completely different when you get a message. If you are social, be social and respond back. If you say you’re outgoing, then pick up the phone and call. If you say you are looking for a relationship not just date… Well I doubt they give out relationships at the local Acme… Email, call, go out for a drink, date before you actually look for a relationship.

Trust me… I read each profile before I send an email and not once have I said something offensive… it’s always a nice hello and reference to their profile. Simple few lines. So if you are read through some of these messages above… the men above are probably really frustrated. I stopped caring. I’ll play the numbers game and won’t care if you don’t respond. After all I know who I am and what I’m worth. If you can’t respond back, you are not worth my time beyond the few minutes I already spent on you.